KNOWN QUANTITY?

The Shadow Candidate (Dean Kuipers, September 2, 2003, AlterNet)

It's not as if California hasn't seen a political creature like Arianna Huffington before. In some ways, she shares an intellectual lineage with her old (briefly) beau and friend, Jerry Brown.

Himself a scion of privilege, and labeled "Governor Moonbeam" for his unorthodox ideas, Brown was similarly focused on the spiritual, studying in a Jesuit Seminary before taking a law degree from Yale and degrees in Latin and Greek from U.C. Berkeley. He was twice elected Governor as a Democrat, and is in his second term as mayor of Oakland as a nonpartisan. He shares with Arianna a similar passion for the great untried idea, and an immunity to risk. He refused to live in the governor's mansion, renting a small apartment instead, and he drove a plain, state-issued Plymouth. He eschews party political machinery. He has been embraced by the Greens, whose motto is "neither left nor right but forward." Sound familiar?

"Don't you need somebody who has transformed in order to transform?" asks Jodie Evans, now an advisor to Arianna's campaign. "When transformation of the system is what you're after, you have to have someone who knows what it means."

But Jerry Brown is more of a known quantity than Arianna.

Thank Darwin those two didn't breed. Posted by Orrin Judd at September 3, 2003 8:56 AM